Where this comes from - full lineage
Keep a Value is a distillation, not an invention. This file is the complete bibliography behind the standard. Each entry names the borrow, the primary source, and the specific rule in the standard it underwrites.
The short version lives in Standard.md under "Where this comes from." This file is the long version for anyone who wants to trace each rule back.
- Promise Theory - Mark Burgess, IFIP/IEEE DSOM 2005 (LNCS 3775); Promise Theory: Principles and Applications, 2nd ed. 2019. The autonomy axiom - an agent can only promise its own behavior - is the subject test of the gate.
- Design by Contract - Bertrand Meyer, "Design by Contract" (1986), Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall 1997. The pre/post/invariant structure is what the standard's "rules that must hold" are.
- Structure / Process / Outcome - Avedis Donabedian, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 44(3), 1966 (DOI 10.1111/j.1468-0009.2005.00397.x). The "feelings need an observable proxy" rule is Donabedian's distinction in miniature.
- Outcomes over Output - Josh Seiden, Outcomes Over Output (2019); Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap (2018). The output-as-outcome failure mode is Perri's "build trap" by another name.
- Goodhart / Strathern / Merton - Charles Goodhart 1975; Marilyn Strathern, European Review 5(3), 1997; Robert K. Merton, American Sociological Review 1(6), 1936 (DOI 10.2307/2084615). The side-effect gate is the literature's answer to "what gets worse when a measure becomes a target."
- Pre-mortem - Gary Klein, Harvard Business Review, September 2007. "What we don't break" is a structured pre-mortem applied per-promise.
- Adversarial Collaboration - Daniel Kahneman & Gary Klein, "Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree," American Psychologist 64(6), 2009 (DOI 10.1037/a0016755). The stranger-test ladder.
- Diátaxis - Daniele Procida (diataxis.fr). The runbook is a how-to; the template is reference; the skeleton is reference-as-form. The three serve different jobs and don't paraphrase each other.
- Self-application - IETF RFC 2119 (Bradner 1997, BCP 14). The spec that defines MUST/SHOULD uses MUST/SHOULD in its own text. KAV's
make check-conformanceenforces the same discipline for VALUE.md files in this repo. - Falsifiability - Karl Popper. A claim that forbids no observation says nothing.
- Value Statement (artifact) - Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm, HarperBusiness, 1991 (ISBN 978-0062292988), "Define the Battle" chapter. Moore's Positioning Statement is the closest sibling artifact in the practitioner literature; KAV's Value Statement borrows the one-line slot-fill move and renames it to escape Moore's sales-positioning baggage.
- Value Statement (bi-directional shape) - Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don, Année Sociologique, 1925 (English ed. Cohen & West 1954; current ed. Routledge ISBN 978-0415267489). The primary source for transaction-as-obligation: give / receive / return as the whole frame, not an emergent property. KAV uses Mauss's shape to describe bi-directional value transactions without violating the autonomy axiom (the standard promises only its own half).
- Value Statement (recipient-decides axiom) - S. L. Vargo & R. F. Lusch, "Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing," Journal of Marketing 68(1), 1-17, January 2004 (DOI 10.1509/jmkg.68.1.1.24036). Foundational Premise 10: "value is uniquely determined by the beneficiary." Aligns with KAV's existing axiom that the named recipient decides whether the change happened. KAV cites FP10 and explicitly declines FP6 (co-creation as promise still violates the autonomy axiom).
- Value Statement Test (the diagnostic move) - Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm, 1991, "Define the Battle" chapter. Moore's Elevator Test treats failure to articulate as a thinking defect, not a communication defect. KAV borrows the move and renames it to escape "elevator pitch" pop-business drift.
- Value Statement Test (the cognitive mechanism) - M. T. H. Chi, M. Bassok, M. W. Lewis, P. Reimann, R. Glaser, "Self-Explanations: How Students Study and Use Examples in Learning to Solve Problems," Cognitive Science 13(2), 145-182, 1989 (DOI 10.1207/s15516709cog1302_1). Peer-reviewed experimental finding that articulation produces understanding silent reading does not. The mechanism behind why the Value Statement Test works. The popularly cited "Feynman technique" does not appear in any of Feynman's own writings.
- Bias blind spot (the literature the cadence argument names honestly) - Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, Lee Ross, "The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28(3), 369-381, 2002 (DOI 10.1177/0146167202286008). The peer-reviewed finding that people detect biases in others more readily than in themselves. KAV does not refute this; Standard.md's "Why this discipline now" section names it explicitly and argues that at LLM-assisted cadence the operational constraint moved - peer review is no longer affordable on every artifact, so a self-administered gate that runs imperfectly beats one that does not run at all. The classical comparison (self-review vs. peer review on N artifacts/week with N bounded by human production rate) is settled. The cadence-shifted comparison (self-administered gate at LLM cadence vs. no gate on the long tail of artifacts peer review cannot reach) is what KAV's paired-run pilot needs to test.
- Code review as the empirical baseline - Alberto Bacchelli & Christian Bird, "Expectations, Outcomes, and Challenges of Modern Code Review," Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013), IEEE, pp. 712-721 (DOI 10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606617). The most-cited empirical study of what peer code review actually yields in practice (knowledge transfer, awareness creation, and some defect catch - but the headline finding is that "understanding the change is the key challenge," which is exactly what a stranger-test cold read measures). KAV cites Bacchelli & Bird as the honest baseline the cadence argument compares against: peer code review's real yield is mostly the readability / naming / mental-model side of the work, which a stranger test catches directly, which is why KAV's six-part gate (specifically item 2, "a stranger gets it") is the closest single-builder analogue.